The Long Road South: How a CR Wide Receiver Refused to Settle—and Reached Ole Miss

Published on Oct 16 2025

On a gray Humboldt afternoon, the rain came sideways. Practice didn’t stop. In the sucking mud on the football field at College of the Redwoods, a young wide receiver dropped into up-downs, chest to earth, palms to sludge. “Missing class isn’t an option,” Coach White barked, and Anthony Aguirre, 6-foot-4, long-striding, stubborn as wet cedar, counted every rep out loud. He laughs about it now. “That’s what got my grades up,” he says. “It wasn’t fun, but it was love.”

If you’re looking for the turning point in Anthony’s story, it’s tempting to pick that moment. But the truth is his life has been a string of turning points, each one answered with the same decision: keep going.

He grew up “kind of all over,” born in Hollywood, Florida, then pinballing between South Florida, Oregon, and Washington. His dad wrestled at Portland State and fought MMA; Anthony wrestled, too—unhappily. “I hated it,” he admits. Football, though, took. He fell in love with wide receiver from its footwork, its geometry, the quiet art of getting open. He studied technicians like Calvin Ridley and, from the same red turf Anthony would later practice on, Eastern Washington’s Cooper Kupp.

Out of high school he signed with Division II Central Washington. A coaching change sent him to Eastern Washington. “They said, ‘We love you, but we don’t have a receiver spot. You can play safety.’” He did. He contributed. But he’d trained his whole life to run routes, not run alleys, and the dream inside him kept tugging him back to receiver.

The route back to receiver ran through Humboldt County.

It helped that his best friend, Paxton, had chosen College of the Redwoods. Helped, too, that Anthony had once lived with Paxton’s family when his own family was stretched thin during the COVID year. “We’ve been close since middle school,” he says. “When he said ‘Redwoods,’ I said, ‘Alright, I’ll go with you.’” Then he read that former NFL receiver Maurice Purify was coaching CR’s wide receivers. “I saw he played for the Bengals, and I thought, ‘That’s gotta help me a lot.’”

He arrived to find a program being rebuilt plank by plank. The year before, there had been days they barely had enough players to scrimmage. “It was an underdog story,” Anthony says. “Like a Rocky movie.” The Redwoods stacked grit on top of character and went to back-to-back bowl games. “We built it from the ground up,” he says. He earned two rings, misplaced somewhere, but kept, he promises, and the program got a new turf field he wishes he could have played on. “It’s beautiful.”

Ask about his favorite moments and he won’t start with touchdowns. He’ll talk about lessons. The rainy practice. The bus ride to an away game when he missed a jet-motion block; Purify pulled him aside and told a story about a teammate who made the same mistake twice and was never heard from again. “You’re going to make mistakes, Anthony,” he recalls Purify saying, “You just can’t make the same one twice.”

More than anything, Redwoods taught him to aim his talent through humility. “I used to care about stats,” he says. “How many catches. Going D1. But my coaches and teammates, especially the linemen, changed me. I’d catch a deep ball, and before I got up, those big guys were already sprinting downfield to line up for the next play. That taught me to be about the next play.”

Character was the currency of the locker room. “Coach White and Coach Mo instilled that,” he says. “JUCO made me a better player because it made me a better man.”

The road out of JUCO is rarely straight. Anthony finished at CR, trained, and waited. Interest from big schools stalled on the same two words: grade point. “A lot of D1s want that 3.0,” he says. “I didn’t have it. That’s on me.” He didn’t fold. He looked for another way in. He and his mother, “she paid for the plane ticket”, picked camps. One of them was Ole Miss.

“I had my best camp ever there,” he says, a spark of joy in his tone. “After a few weeks they said, ‘We want to offer you.’” It was a preferred walk-on, not a full scholarship. He took it. “I don’t even feel like I had a choice,” he says. “I’m chasing a dream.”

Ole Miss was everything he imagined and more--coaches at his side, plentiful meals, fans cheering along the Walk of Champions. Every high five, every nod reminded him: he was a role model now. And yet, amid all the applause, the real engine had already been built at JUCO: the long grind, the mud-soaked practices, the stubborn patience that turns struggle into quiet strength. That fire, forged through sweat and lessons learned, anchored him in every new arena.

“At CR, you show up early or you’re running,” he says. “Here, some guys show up late. They’re crazy talented, but they never had to build the discipline.” He’s not judging; he’s observing. “Ole Miss talks about character all the time. Because if you give someone every resource in the world and they don’t have the discipline to use it, it doesn’t matter.”

An eligibility hiccup, wrong classes toward his degree taken at Ole Miss, means he can practice with the Rebels but cannot play this season. He’s filing a waiver and believes he may have another year or two to give. In the meantime, he treats this as a redshirt with purpose. “A lot of guys take that year off,” he says. “I’ve never been wired like that. This year is about getting better, getting creative in my route running, learning the small margins.”

His goals are unblushing. Start next year. Chase All-American. Hear his name on draft day. “I want to play professionally,” he says, steady as a cadence. “But I asked myself—does the NFL bring me closer to Christ or further away? Turning my life to Jesus changed my why. If football ended tomorrow, I’d still have Him. And because of that, I play freer.”

When he speaks about faith, he’s not preaching at you so much as offering the map he uses. He remembers being 15—lonely, changing households, walking fifteen minutes to the track before school to time his sprints, building a routine he could hold onto. He remembers being 18 and deciding to believe in Jesus. Then 21 and deciding to follow. “Believing is easy,” he says. “Following is daily.”

He smiles when you ask what people might be surprised to learn about him. “I’m introverted,” he says. “I don’t need much. Not materialistic. Purpose. The people I love. That’s enough.”

On a shelf somewhere are two JUCO bowl rings. On his phone are photos of walks with Lily (his girlfriend) around Oxford’s old square. In his head are words he carries like a stitched-in label. They came in a quiet moment after a CR’s bowl win, when players were hugging and helmets thumped one last time, Coach White pulled him aside. “You’re a great player, Anthony. You play like you’re hungry,” he told him. “When you play like you’re starving, you’ll be the best.”

Anthony repeats the line softly, almost to himself, as if tasting it again. Starving, not for attention, but for the work. For the next rep. For the next play. For the kind of greatness that starts as character and ends as a career.

On another gray day, because there are always more gray days than sunny ones when you’re trying to become something great, he’ll lace his cleats and chase the same thing he chased in the Humboldt rain: not perfection, but progress. Not applause, but purpose.

The mud’s different in Mississippi, but the fire JUCO forged in Anthony, the patience, the fight, the quiet confidence that comes from knowing struggle, is everywhere he goes. And every step, every tackle, every snap carries the proof: he’s more than where he plays—he’s who he’s become.